Business News

Joint and several liability is important in personal injury actions and was created to protect the injured.  Two elements need to exist for joint and several liability to apply: (1) negligent cause of action, and (2) two or more defendants.  Under joint and several liability, each defendant is jointly responsible for all economic damages awarded in favor of the plaintiff, regardless of the percentage of fault found against any particular defendant.  What does this mean and why is it important?

Small business owners know that every penny counts.  Like the good farmer, you want to know that at the end of the season, you have reaped a good harvest.  How do you know if switching to an S corporation status will yield significant benefits at the end of the tax year?
Think about this: You can be “double taxed” if you are now operating as a C corporation.  Your profits, like the good harvest, can shrink since those profits are taxed to the corporation and taxed again to the shareholders when paid out as dividends.

Taking a federal tax deduction for support provided to your favorite charity may now be easier — or more difficult, depending on which provision in a new tax law affects you. Here’s a selected overview of new and existing charitable donation rules. What has changed? In 2006 and 2007, if you’re 70 or older you can make direct transfers from your IRA to qualified charities.

As the Trustee of a trust, you have numerous responsibilities, some of which for various reasons may not receive your fullest attention. For example, if you are a Trustee, it is not uncommon to be confused about or even ignorant of your position’s requirements.  You may not have read the Trust document recently, and instead are relying on your memory of its contents or on advice provided by a lawyer years ago.  In that case, you may actually be operating under false assumptions about the requirements.  With no one looking over your shoulder, it’s easy to grow complacent over the years.

As we all have come to see, interest rates remain steady and the housing inventory is plummeting from its historic high.  That’s the best news for home sellers in months.  It’s a funny thing to me, the market we emerged from where at best 400 properties were on the market across the SCV (vs. 2300 today).  Folks sold homes for top dollar, and then had little inventory to choose from, but they had to pay through the nose at “non-negotiable” prices for whatever could be found (the same went for all buyers, move up sellers or not), was called a “great market.

Have you ever been told that if it sounds too good to be true, it is?  How many times have I found myself looking for the very cheapest item I can find when shopping, only to discover later that it broke or it didn’t work right because “you get what you pay for?”  We are always caught in the middle of paying too much and feeling stupid or paying too little and not getting any value and wasting our money.  This is never more true than in the mortgage industry.

Write-offs are the government’s way of rewarding taxpayers when they’ve done something the government likes.  And to judge by the write-offs, the government likes it when people borrow money to buy a house.  There are write-offs aplenty, many of which people often forget.  Make sure you take advantage of every break the IRS will give.  Here are a few we tend to forget:

As co-owner of Keller Williams VIP Properties here in Valencia, I understand the importance of building relationships.  We started Keller Williams in 2003 with eight associates and are fortunate to now have over 200 licensed realtors that consider Keller Williams VIP Properties their home.  We strongly believe the primary reason for our growth is our acknowledgement that the most valuable people in our company are the associates themselves.  We emphasize in our company the importance of building long-term relationships with our clients.

Later this month, Microsoft will be releasing its newest Operating System for sale to consumers and small-to-medium business customers.  Large Business customers had access to Vista the end of November 2006.  If you run any custom or special software or if you use any older hardware on your computer, do not rush out to upgrade to the new OS without spending time to test to ensure that your current software and hardware are compatible with Vista.

Nearly half the shoppers recently surveyed by Deloitte and Touche reported they bought goods and services online. Just as significant: Nine out of 10 shoppers said they had done their price-comparison shopping online before making purchases at physical stores.
This underscores the value of a website to any retail business. Still, 60 percent of American businesses are not yet online, according to figures issued by Microsoft in November 2006.

California state law allows debtors to protect certain assets from the reach of creditors.  These laws have their origins in England.  The first English exemption law protected only the debtor’s clothes, bedding and tools of the trade.  Today, debtors can protect much more by applying the proper state exemption laws.

What a great question!  Many things come to mind.  To my surprise it wasn’t any of those things!  I’ve been managing other people’s money for over three decades and my greatest asset wasn’t my wealth of knowledge or vast array of achievements, in fact, it was my inherent ability to handle trust!
To be a trusted advisor!  I thought about the many teachers, mentors and loved ones that were my trusted advisors never thinking that I would be one myself, one day.

In past articles, I have written on topics such as arbitration and the weighing of the costs and benefits of including an attorney’s fees provision in a contract.  This article considers the two together. Whenever a business client comes to see me with a dispute involving a written agreement, one of the first things I check for is whether the client agreed to binding contractual arbitration to resolve the dispute.  What I mean by this is an agreement executed in writing by the parties which require some or all of the disputes to be arbitrated as opposed to litigated.